Dutch language

How to pronounce solidify in Dutch?

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This is a story about the Netherlands as you seldom see it.
This is our country seen from the sky.
If you want to know what our daily life looks like...
sometimes chaotic, sometimes very well-ordered...
then take a look from a spectacular, new perspective.
In this episode: country of water.
We regard the water as a friend.
But it is still a dangerous enemy.
What will happen if we are faced with a huge dyke breach?
16 million people on a small piece of ground.
Seen from the sky.
This is The Netherlands From Above.
On the left the Waddenzee.
On the right the Ijsselmeer.
Even from space the Afsluitdijk is recognizable...
due to the difference in color of the water.
After hundreds of years of hard battle we are lord and master.
And taming the water produces extraordinary landschapes.
But once every 10,000 years it can still go wrong.
Once every 10,000 years.
So, that could be next week.
In The Netherlands From Above: Is the water our friend...
or will it ever become our enemy again
The Netherlands, 6,000 years ago.
The force of the water shows the vulnerability of our country.
Practically uninhabitable.
Around 2750 before Christ, the salt water withdrew.
Mercilessly striking back in the year 800.
1287: St. Lucia's flood.
Over 50,000 thousand people drowned.
We have been fighting back ever since.
We build dykes, construct polders...
and increasingly conquer more land from the water.
We feel so safe now, that the latest land reclamation...
is being carried out for purely economic reasons.
The Second Maasvlakte.
The water shaped our country, but our character as well.
As stubborn as we are, we build the most beautiful and newest houses...
in the most vulnerable places.
The Loosdrechtse Plassen.
Marken, 50 centimeters above NAP level.
Lelystad, two and a half meters below NAP level.
Lemmer, 20 centimeters above.
And Itteren, wet feet every year...
when the Maas overflows its banks.
Katwijk, a weak link along the coast.
You see a narrow beach.
Katwijk has built on the entire line of dunes.
What could happen is that the frontline of dunes...
could collapses with a very high tide.
The center of Katwijk would flood.
From the dune hollow, since it's situated in a kind of dip...
it would then flow over the edge into the rest of the Randstad.
This is indeed a weak link.
Safe up till now, but if the sea level rises...
it will be essential to do something about it.
The Netherlands consists of dyked areas..
to protect us against high water.
One of the largest and most vulnerable, is dyke ring 14.
From Rotterdam to Amsterdam is one dyke ring.
So, if a dyke breaks and the sea forces its way in...
the Netherlands could be flooded from Rotterdam to Amsterdam.
Because if something goes wrong in the Netherlands, that is where it will happen.
It's a terrifying scenario.
Our country, divided into 95 dyke ring areas.
We think we are safe.
Because once every 10,000 years seems so far away.
But it could also happen now.
This is what a perfect storm might cause.
The black eye of the hurricane lurking over the North Sea.
If and when it will strike, no one knows.
High tide in the rivers.
Spring tide and an extremely ferocious north-westerly hurricane.
Suddenly making a turn to the south-west.
The first place to meet with disaster is Zeeland.
Then Katwijk.
Den Helder and even at Lelystad.
Our 'safe' defensive line of dyke rings broken through.
The Land van Maas en Waal river area.
Farmer Bart Vissers and his farm are enclosed...
by both rivers.
I'm known here as an honest, tough and stubborn type.
The threat of the water has shaped Bart, but he isn't scared.
We secretly hope that the water...
gets rough far more often.
We won't be scared at all then.
Then I won't be a farmer but a fisherman. Since it's agriculture and fisheries.
That's the good thing about the floodplains.
You're never out of food.
It went wrong in the winter of 1995.
Move along!
There was a threat of a flood and the entire river area...
had to be evacuated.
But Bart thought differently.
They called my wife in the morning, I was milking the cows...
saying the farm had to be evacuated by four in the afternoon.
That's what my wife told me in the milking parlor.
My cows were outside and I thought...
I am not going, it's nonsense that I have to leave.
That's when I took precautions.
I built a dyke of two meters around it.
So that couldn't happen.
Fortunately I got the municipal executive's permission.
They agreed and I could stay.
When the water in the rivers was high it suddenly flooded the place at night.
The milk van was on the higher area.
The cows were over there on the high part.
And here, in between, was water.
The cows didn't want to come to me, I went to them.
At first I could walk far into the water.
But later I had to swim
I reached the cows but I had to return every time.
All the cows were swimming around me.
60 cows.
I was really scared they would swim over me and drown me.
I got really scared for a minute.
But when I was on the dry part with the cows...
I felt proud again.
That was the only time I was scared of the water.
1014
1287
1468
1953
So many floods, but it's all so long ago.
Water should be loved.
Not feared.
The Zuidplaspolder.
We are at the Zuidplaspolder, in the middle of Zuid-Holland.
This is the lowest point of the Netherlands.
It is 6.74 meters below NAP level.
If the dykes here were to break...
the land here would end up about 7 meters under water.
The treetops would still be visible, but for the rest...
Most dyke rings are small in size.
This is one of the largest and most vulnerable of our country.
Dyke ring 14.
The four largest cities.
The Westland.
The House of Representatives.
The economic heartland.
Soon under the water.
Even 48 hours after the dyke breach...
the salt water is still streaming into the bathtub.
Hundreds of thousands of people panicking.
Schiphol Airport unreachable.
Fleeing by highway is impossible...
because all roads and access routes are flooded.
Woerden area, spring of 2011.
The severe drought caused dangerous cracks...
in the river dykes.
One wide one. A very wide and a very deep one.
Almost 35 centimeters. -Yes.
And here underneath too, see? -Oh wow.
Too much water is a problem...
too little makes our clay dykes just as vulnerable.
These cracks in the dry part are becoming longer and deeper.
And the cracks in the part we're spraying...
have not become deeper, nor longer.
They've actually remained stable.
I wouldn't say it's got less, but stable at least.
And these have worsened. This is 35 centimeters.
When we started it was about 20.
Marcel created a sprinkler from a tractor and a sprayer...
to protect the lower land against a dyke breach.
If this one collapses, the polder will be flooded.
And your house. -And the house.That's what I mean.
Inventiveness combined with stubbornness formed us.
And even made us famous internationally.
The Maeslantkering.
The Philipsdam.
Kampen. The inflatable weir.
Neeltje Jans.
The Afsluitdijk.
They come from all over the world to see...
how we keep our feet dry with dykes and water pump stations.
Dutch water defenses are even export products.
Our biggest natural enemy, the water, has been defeated.
The weather is fine.
It's often grey and raining when I drive here.
It reminds me of the text by Doctorandus P.
'The land is flat, the sky overcast, at least it usually is.'
'A stubborn human race inhabits the excavated turf.'
Eemshaven, Groningen.
Our latest invention. A live dyke.
You can't see with the naked eye whether a dyke is about to burst.
But here we can look into the dyke...
to see whether or not there is a weak link during a heavy storm.
I can read the sensors under my feet...
live on this tablet.
We are now at this point.
When I click it shows the cross-section of this dyke.
The seawater pushes against it on this side.
And in that dyke there is also some water.
You have to imagine that with a high tide...
the water in that dyke also rises more or less.
If I pick a one-week period...
you can clearly see that...
the effects of low and high tides are also visible in that dyke.
It makes the Netherlands a bit safer...
and I think we can help a lot of countries that are affected by flooding...
with a great export product.
Every day you can read about countries having trouble with high water.
We continue to raise, broaden, renew.
The safest delta in the world.
And yet...
that one disastrous hurricane.
The effects of the disaster become visible.
Not only is the area within dyke ring 14 affected...
but also Zeeland.
Noord-Holland.
And Flevoland.
The water keeps streaming everywhere.
Even a week after the first breach.
The damage amounts to 121 billion.
And almost 2.3 million inhabitants have been affected.
The number of people killed is estimated at over 10,000.
We will have to pump all that water away too.
We will still be doing that one year later.
We will have to rebuild our country completely.
Nature gave us the widest dune area of the world.
But we are not satisfied with that.
We want nature to work for us.
This is a very special place. We are flying above the Zandmotor.
This is the first major experiment in the Netherlands...
with 'building with nature'.
A new way of dealing with our coast protection.
Millions of cubic meters of sand have been sprayed here...
approximately 20 million in total, and laid down in front of the beach.
The idea is that the sea and the wind together...
will take care of the spreading of the sand...
in a northerly direction...
along the coast, in the direction of The Hague and further.
And that we solidify our dunes and beaches...
in a more natural way.
The dredgers, researchers and engineers...
will follow the process to learn from it.
Whether the sand will indeed move with the expected speed.
Because we still have to refine the new technology...
to find out how we can best approach it.
Researchers on jetskis making dead-straight tracks.
That is how we measure if the sand is going to the right places.
If we manage to use water and wind to protect us...
instead of destroying us...
we will even have outsmarted nature.
The sand is very dynamic, it is different every day.
A lot of sand comes onto the beach from the foreshore and vice versa.
With storms, quiet periods. It is very interesting...
the way it slowly builds the coast, and sand spreads.
If we know how the sand slowly spreads to the coast...
we can put it in the right spot...
so it defends our coast better.
And with those measurements we can see if that happens, and how.
So we can design a better sandmotor in future.
You see that a new recreation area...
and nature area are being formed here.
I even see kitesurfers in the distance...
in the lagoon that was more or less created by nature...
enjoying their sport.
So, it's a beautiful new part of the Netherlands.
Water as our friend.
Safe to live by.
To enjoy.
Or even earn money from.
The water shaped us.
Our country, but mainly our character.

This is a story about the Netherlands as you seldom see it.

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solidify::verb | Spocien Dictionary

solidify

verb

/sə'lɪdə,faɪ/

become solid

Type	Words
Type of	change integrity
Has types	freeze out, congeal, consolidate, freeze down, crystalise, crystalize, crystallize, freeze, effloresce, set, jell
Derivation	solidification, solid, solidifying

solidify::verb | Spocien Dictionary

solidify

verb

/sə'lɪdə,faɪ/

make solid or more solid; cause to solidify

Type	Words
Type of	change integrity
Has types	consolidate, concrete
Derivation	solid, solidification, solidifying

How to pronounce solidify in Dutch?

solidify::verb | Spocien Dictionary

abandonment

Related words

solidify::verb | Spocien Dictionary

abandonment

Related words

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